Spareparts.Exchange: Rahim And Robert, Stitched Together In Silence

Spare Parts (spareparts.exchange) is an art installation created collaboratively by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Jim Ruxton, Camille Turner, and Monir Moniruzzaman. Based on Monir Moniruzzaman’s ethnographic research on the illicit organ trade, Spare Parts explores the ethics of organ trafficking and the emergence of bodily inequality in times of transplant tinkering. In this installation, the viewer is confronted with life sized video projections of Rahim Sheikh, a Bangladeshi kidney seller and Robert Zurrer, a Canadian kidney transplant recipient/buyer, whose kidneys were commodified in the marketplace. The video projections are installed so that the individuals sit in silence facing each other.  Spare Parts highlights the intimacy of spare parts, the economy of the global marketplace, the perils of techno-medicine, and what is means to be human in the 21 st century. The installation captures that the buying and selling of body parts is not just a market transaction, but rather represents the desperation, dis/connection, and inequality that exists in the trade.